


some say that he was never here at all

by Dorkangel



Category: Black Sails
Genre: (mostly), Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Daemon Touching, Daemons, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Abuse, James McGraw and Flint are different people, M/M, Multi, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-21 03:58:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11935851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: Without Thomas, James feels the universe tilt on its axis, grating and wrong.And when he screams, the howl that comes from his daemon is not a howl that he has heard before.*An exploration of daemons and their humans in Nassau; settling, changing, lost, found.





	some say that he was never here at all

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warnings apply to what happens in canon only - so for references to Billy and Anne's past that might be unpleasant for some people, and period-typical attitudes to homosexuality and marital infidelity (with the James/Thomas/Miranda thing). it's all good and fluffy in the end, I hope.
> 
> also a warning for mentions of traumatic daemon separation (intercision), although, that probably doesn't count, because they're not real.
> 
> full list of daemons in the end notes!

 James McGraw is ten years old, but he looks younger, and he stands stiff and straight-backed at his full four feet and glares out at an uncaring world. And beside him as always, panting with the worries that the boy himself would never express, is a daemon in the form of a young, russet-haired dog. A red setter, Hennessey thinks, at a glance, although he isn’t sure. Corentin changes his form too often for them to research every shape.

James’s daemon favours dogs. That’s a good thing, as far as it matters: dogs are appropriate for the military, well-suited to life aboard ship, and for those juvenile enough to conflate a daemon and its form to an actual animal, clever and obedient. Admiral Hennessey’s own daemon is a tall, sturdy wolfhound, a shrewd lady; neither of them worry over Corentin’s reluctance to settle. James, at ten, is as puppyish as his daemon, and it’s not particularly strange for a boy of his age to be unsure of his self.

By the time the lad is fifteen, his unsettled daemon is most _certainly_ strange – Corentin shifts with every flare of James’s inconstant temper, flickering between a sea-eagle with ruffled feathers, a wildcat with its claws bared, a striking snake, a snarling dog. When Hennessey chastises the boy, on the rare occasions that he beats him, Corentin becomes a lanky, adolescent wolfhound with his tail between his legs as he lies, miserable, at his human’s feet.

More than once, James has pressed his face into his daemon’s fur (or scales, or hide, or feathers)  and begged, whispered, demanded, “ _settle, Cor_ ”, in the foolish hope that reasoning with one’s soul might actually ever achieve anything. Sometimes he licks James’s cheek, or curls into his arms; most usually, he simply stares back at his human and tells him, “it doesn’t work that way.”

Two years later James sits on a dock and watches a handsome young sailor walk by with something like longing and something like despair and something like resignation, and he feels something in the nature of his universe _shift_ , as easily as a lock clicking into place. Corentin looks up at him from the eyes of Brittany dog, white and pale ginger that compliments the darker red of James’s hair.

“Just like that?” he says, feeling surprisingly unchanged. His daemon’s new tail thuds against his side.

“Just like that.” agrees Corentin. “I feel... right.”

A gundog. James can live with that, very happily.

“The Admiral will be pleased.” adds Corentin, and James can’t find it in himself to argue the ironic tone of his voice.

 

*

 

The first time they meet, Lord Thomas Hamilton greets him with a curious smile and bright, intelligent eyes that mirror those of his daemon, a dark-feathered owl with tall tufts of fur on her ears. Her name is Jakamalfi, something that Lord Hamilton pronounces with more than a hint of embarrassment – _call  me Thomas_ , he insists, rather too early in their professional relationship for such informality, _and Malf_ – and from her perch on her human’s shoulders she turns her mobile head to peer at Corentin, far more openly than is proper. James feels his daemon lean in closer to his leg, and a wave of _shame-resentment-irritation_ as Corentin assumes that Malf is staring him down as some sort of power play.

(They’ll realise later that Malf, just like Thomas, simply doesn’t care for social convention and wants to see more of her new companion.)

Owl daemons are traditionally seen as signifiers of discerning thought and wit in a person. Malf, however, spends the time that Thomas and James spend debating semantics and theoreticals of Thomas’s plan to free Nassau of its pirate lords experimenting with how far and on what wingspan she can glide by throwing herself from bookcase to bookcase, restless and eager to explore. Thomas is hardly lacking in wit; but more often than not, it’s his daemon cutting down a thoughtless remark or fruitless idea herself. The first time it happens, James is deliberately playing devil’s advocate, arguing that the – staunchly democratic – pirates will never accept a leader that they have not chosen themselves, no matter his strength – and then a clear voice rings through the study from behind him, venomous with sarcasm, saying, “because we’re simply _sure_ to find the men we’re assuming are desperate for pardons, the men who crowned Henry Avery ‘pirate king’, chanting _vive la republic_?”

James freezes, too shocked to reply.

Corentin laughs until his sides hurt and he has to roll onto his back, like a surrender.

“Traitor,” hisses James, not meaning it, as Malf flies back to her human’s shoulder, and for his troubles receives a nip on his ankle and the sight of Thomas Hamilton trying to maintain the last shreds of propriety between them and hold back a grin.

Miranda Hamilton’s daemon is a crow. He grooms Malf affectionately (perfectly natural, for a married couple, although James and Corentin still avert their eyes) and nuzzles into Miranda’s black hair so that he half-disappears there, and seeing that, James finds himself unsurprised by Miranda’s warm and open nature. Her daemon, Batair, speaks to Corentin in a low voice while the humans make their plans for the future, while Miranda’s hand (surely accidentally?) brushes James’s under the table and he tries not to flush red, and when they are lying alone together in James’s rooms that night and he asks his daemon what they had talked about, exactly – he had felt _safety_ and _interest_ and _trust_ , but he had not heard the words – Corentin blinks slow and thoughtful, and says that Batair had asked him about his accent, a more Celtic sound than James has allowed himself to speak with for years, and had told him he was glad that neither James nor Corentin had been disgusted or frightened by his form. Some say that crows are omens of dark fortune, that Miranda is a person with disaster with her future. Others, though, know that crows are just crows, and when James says as much Corentin nods his agreement.

Thomas and Malf must have thought nothing of Miranda and Batair, James mentions off-handedly, not with how odd Malf can be; probably it would never have occurred to him that they have a trio of unusual daemons if Corentin hadn’t pointed it out. The idea pauses him in his tracks for a moment, before he pinches out the candle.

“Hush,” he says.

Corentin curls into a warm ball by his side, and mutters a reply.

“I will not.”

 

*

 

When they lose Thomas and Malf, James is shattered. He remembers Alfred Hamilton’s big, ugly crocodile daemon, and the harsh gaze of Hennessey’s wolfhound, and Batair pressing into his hands as Miranda sobs with terror and horror and impotent rage. The three of them had touched each other’s daemons, taboo as it might be, and their daemons had touched too, Malf nesting in the hollow of Corentin’s belly at night, Batair resting on Corentin’s back as they talk, and Malf and Batair of course cozying up on a shared perch. Thomas had stroked Corentin often, more gently than he would an actual dog, and James had shivered at the ghost sensation of it as his soul had been laid bare to this beautiful man.

And then Thomas was gone and the world was telling James that he was a monster and Miranda that she was a whore, and they were looking at Batair like he brought their misfortune upon them, and Corentin like an unruly hound that needed to be brought to heel.

And James feels the universe tilt on its axis, grating and wrong.

The first moment that he was alone, he _screamed_. And the howl that came from his daemon was not a howl that he had heard before.

When he dared to look out from between his fingers, Corentin was some other creature, a rough-edged shaggy beast, teeth bared and hackles raised. Not at James. At the world.

A coyote, Miranda tells him, shaken by the sight of a grown man with a daemon who has changed. When James presses further, she tells him that they are vicious animals from the Americas, hunters and scavengers.

He loves Corentin with all his being, and it is still Corentin who licks his wounds, who whispers secret advice to him and knows his heart better than James ever will. But this new version of him fills even James something with dread; “imagine,” says Corentin, pacing the deck of the cabin on the ship that they are taking to New Providence Island, “what the pirates will think of it.”

 

*

 

“Flint.” he introduces himself, to Gates. “And Cor.”

To shorten down a daemon’s name is meaningless, most of the time. Daemons name themselves hard things to say and their humans give them affectionate nicknames.

Corentin becoming Cor is a brutal cut in James’s nature, a severing of his new self from his old, of Flint from McGraw.

Hal Gates is one of the first men he meets with a daemon in an alien form, one she’s taken from the animals of the New World; his girl Aberian is a tiny monkey that clambers into the rigging and smiles just as a human might. James tries not to let it show that she disturbs him just a little, but Gates notices anyway, and he laughs it off. She’s a capuchin, apparently, a jungle creature, and she’s useful in this business. Her hands are agile enough that she tattooed the third eye that stares out of the back of Gates’s head herself.

(Years later, her too-human eyes will meet James’s eyes as Cor holds her in his teeth and James wrenches Hal’s neck to the side, and he will see the precise moment that she becomes Dust, and the memory of it will never leave him.)

He tries to give Miranda a new life that is the closest they can achieve to her old one. Her homestead is as comfortable and safe as they can achieve, even if she has to work for it herself, and she can still meddle in the political affairs of the island through her lover. He fails, nonetheless. It’s less than a shadow of her former status, and she and Batair are isolated and alone, and it takes only months for rumours to begin to fly that she is a witch. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Batair is a loving, tactile daemon, and despite his wings he never leaves his human’s side – the idea that Miranda would willingly separate from him along the edge of the world is ridiculous enough to be almost laughable.

If Flint’s men choose to believe that he takes counsel from a witch exiled from her clan who lives in the interior, they can do so. It only adds to his mystery and to his power.

 

*

 

Very few pirates have dog daemons. In the Navy they had been common, almost universal among everyone other than pressed men, but here are not exactly sailors but people desperate enough to steal and not at all inclined to obedience, and so here are a range of daemons. The only man on the crew of the Walrus with one is Billy, and his golden retriever, Lieali; she’s one of the reasons that they had begun to call him ‘Bones’ when he first came aboard, because she was so visibly starved, in a way that his clothes had hid. The captain of the ship that Billy had been forced to work on had been a nasty sort, the kind to have a daemon punished in the place of its human, to inspire a special fear in his crew; Lieali has long scars on her sides, and constant wariness in her expression. Seeing that, no one is surprised when Billy takes Flint up on his offer to kill the man, or when Gates and Aberian take them carefully under their wing.

 

*

 

Charles Vane is tailed everywhere by a wolverine named Hedda who is, in James’s opinion, downright belligerent, growling at anyone who comes too close and lunging at enemy daemons even before her human has a chance to draw his sword. He doesn’t know it – barely anyone knows it, save for Rackham and Bonny, and Eleanor Guthrie, who knows him intimately and knows everything else worth knowing too – but Hedda had settled by the time that Charles was seven years old, had found a tough form that she could use to keep them safe from Albinus and his men, and stayed that way. Let it never be said that Vane is not a man who knows his mind.

He and his quartermaster and the veritable assassin that is Anne Bonny on a bad day make a funny image, the three of them together – not that anyone would dare laugh. Hedda, behind Charles, watching his back, both built of solid muscle; Jack’s Triszilli, a chameleon, often enough sat in his hair, her eyes rolling in every direction so she can see everything at once; and Neron, Anne’s boar daemon, glowering steadily from her side, just as untouchable as she is. Neron doesn’t speak, but then for all intents and purposes neither does Anne, really – Triszilli speaks too much, filling in words for Jack so that they don’t have to pause for breath when they talk, and she flashes whatever colour she fancies for whatever reason brightly enough to be distracting. In the few meetings James has had with Rackham, he has suspected that if someone had the time and the reason, they could learn to read his and Triszilli emotions through those colours she telegraphs so clearly. Cor had suggested to him that, probably, Anne and Neron do so.

Everyone knows the story of how Jack had cut James Bonny’s throat – the man had been a small-time pirate himself, though a shit one – and reached out through the still dissipating Dust to take the hand of his cowering child-wife and pull her with him to safety. Not everyone knows that Neron had settled that very night, that Anne had looked at the face of her rescuer, only a teenager himself, and had known without a shred of doubt what her role in the world would be.

 

*

 

James understands immediately that Eleanor Guthrie, no matter her tender age, is a force to be reckoned with. She is sixteen, dressed half in men’s clothes, and she wears her milksnake daemon around her neck as she smirks at him from behind an outsize desk. Flint and his men have begun to garner an impressive profit, and she wants to make sure that they will be loyal to her.

He keeps his gaze flat and unimpressed.

“Do you know why Aubrianna settled the way that she did, Captain?” asks Eleanor, faux-sweet and razor-edged. Corentin noses uncertainly at James’s leg, but he ignores him, shakes his head no. Eleanor speaks as though about some fond memory. “Captain Teach marched in her, four years ago, and he cursed me for a turncoat and a _snake_.”

Aubrianna stirs slowly as the girl talks, periodically tasting the air. It’s an unsettling effect.

“I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.” Eleanor tells him coldly. “All I care about is power. And profit.”

James doesn’t reply for a moment. He listens to Cor’s breathing, feels his thoughts, and Cor thinks _vengeance-fury-triumph_ , and James allows a small, slow smile to spread across his face.

“I think we can help each other.”

When the Guthrie girl – years after she and Vane and Flint and the others force Teach from the island – pays off Mister Noonan at the brothel and starts openly parading around with one of the whores, a pretty girl with dark skin and kohl-lined pale eyes, the pirates don’t react with the customary disgust that James had expected. They balk at her daring, some of them, or dismiss it as a farce ( _it’s not like it’s an equal relationship, is it, one’s paid and the other pays her, and no one on the damn island hasn’t seen her and Charles Vane together_ ) but they still respect her and they still very gladly accept her business and do her bidding.

If she notices the subtle ways in which Flint and Cor warm to her when they realise her desires, that she’s _like them_ , she says nothing of it.

The girl’s name is Max, just Max, and at first she’s nothing more to anyone than the half-naked, wholly sensual thing on Eleanor’s arm. Neither her nor her daemon, a black cat with long fur named Dashielle, give away even the slightest indication of their massive intellect, him purring and winding elegantly between Eleanor’s legs, and her with her honeyed words and beaming smiles. Aubrianna knows that they’re smarter than they let on, and she tells Eleanor so, but Eleanor ignores it.

After all, why would Max betray her?

 

*

 

John Silver is a deceptive little _shit_ , and so is his daemon, no doubt about it. Few daemons can lie outright, since few daemons speak aloud to anyone other than their humans and their body language is so much less controlled than that of a person – but, even despite the fact that they find him standing over a corpse, Silver’s daemon’s seemingly terrified curling in on herself is enough to convince them of his relative innocence. Logically, they all know, everyone knows, that a daemon’s form rarely means what it would be assumed to mean – but she seems so _small_ , winding tight about his hand and shyly burying her face in his side. Her name is Reintje, and she’s a pine marten, and few of the crew know it but pine martens are more devious than foxes.

They take him to the brothel, Dooley and Logan and Muldoon and the others, and Dashielle has to physically pounce on Reintje to drag her away from  the page that Silver had ripped from the captain’s log. He doesn’t forget about it, either; while his human has Silver cornered, he bares a single claw and politely asks Reintje what, exactly, she’s stolen from Captain Flint.

Reintje considers the sleek predator beneath Dashielle’s pampered, fluffy exterior, and is pleased to discover an equally cunning business partner.

 

*

 

Of course, when they catch him, Silver plays it up again. He does a great act of trying to hide Reintje behind him while he’s threatened, claiming a terrifically low tolerance for pain like he’s afraid they might decide to hurt his daemon: Eleanor is offended at the very idea, Flint can tell, but he sees himself and his crazed expression, her venomous daemon, and Cor alert and dangerous, and understands why he might.

Two years on, when they pass little Abigail Ashe and her wren daemon on to her father, when it all goes wrong, part of the way that the redcoats torture John is that they grab Reintje and hold her roughly enough that it immobilises him and robs his breath with the horrible shuddering wrongness that is someone, unpermitted, laying hands on a daemon. The crew find him, afterwards, by following Reintje’s screaming – her leg is whole, no matter what the redcoats have done to her human’s, and Lieali has to hold her down as they amputate to stop her from getting in the way, just far enough from John that their bond is pulled tight and painful.

She walks with a limp that mirrors his for the rest of her life.

James doesn’t think he would have known what to do, if it wasn’t for Cor. His daemon had had to pull him by the sleeve to John’s bedside, and order James to “ _help him!_ ” before he understands, and has John lifted to his cabin and a mercifully (finally) unconscious Reintje carried there by Howell’s crane daemon to rest. She twitches the whole time, fighting sleep in a way that makes Cor whine with sympathy; there are daemons who keep their injured humans alive every second of every day, he knows, who push frantically on their chests to keep their hearts beating. That’s no kind of existence. James sits by the two of them – Reintje on John’s chest – and reads, and without warning Cor pushes his snout into Reintje’s side and quiets her, and James realises that he might care for the little shit just slightly more than he had intended to.

 

*

 

Losing Miranda hurts so much that he thinks he might break apart again. It wasn’t exactly painful, his daemon shifting – it had been as easy as when he was a child, the flow of Dust simply changing shapes – but he’s afraid of losing himself, and he gathers Cor up in his arms and holds him tight while they sob like he might somehow be able to hold himself together solely through strength of arms and will. She’s _gone_ , the only constant in this awful world without Thomas and Malf, and Batair with her, crumpling into Dust before James could even see him go. And Peter Ashe had laid her out, daemonless and alone, and let the crowd and their daemons, expressions grotesque with hatred, throw _shit_ at her like she and Batair hadn’t been deserving of a throne above them all.

Those that see James and Cor, with bloodied sword and teeth, through the fire and the swirling Dust of Charlestown burning, swear that they have seen the devil and his familiar.

He doesn’t care at all. Sometimes he thinks he sees long black hair, a black wing, out of the corner of his eye, and it aches deep in his chest, below where he can feel his bond with Cor. In the dreams where he is crossing to the other side with Miranda, in the dreams where she is screaming at him, it is Cor who guides him back to reality, and he wakes up with his daemon’s comforting weight heavy on his lap and the knowledge that Cor has been having nightmares too.

 

*

 

The last thing he had expected to get out of this abominable mess would be Charles Vane as almost a friend, but he’s trying not to be too openly surprised. Neither of them are even remotely prepared to accept English rule, which is the only thing that matters for the incoming storm.

On the deck of the Walrus, Hedda looks hard at Cor, who sniffs and keeps his eyes on the horizon. Above their obstinate daemons, Vane snorts a laugh.

“Ain’t so different, you and I.” he says, nodding to the pair of them. James crooks an eyebrow.

“Guess not.”

 

*

 

Mister Scott’s daughter is absolutely regal, calm and kind and dignified, and her daemon – some kind of long-faced deer or antelope, although James couldn’t say which kind – matches her posture in every step, and her gracious nature, and he’s sure the overall effect would be stunning if John wasn’t leaning heavily enough on his shoulder to be concerning and they weren’t all currently at risk of being interrogated and executed by her.

Ben Gunn has suffered a worse fate than that. It’s Billy that pulls him, gently, out of the fetal position he has curled into, and shoos the men back when they crowd around, sensing that something is badly wrong. Ben is dead, in some small, important way, behind the eyes, but for a minute they collectively presume that his daemon is some tiny creature hidden on his person, a mouse or a cricket or a moth.

And then they realise what has been done to him.

John goes willingly to meet with Scott’s daughter, but he does so with his Reintje on his shoulder, half-hidden behind his neck; he is not a coward (not anymore, at least) and they have survived a lot together, but neither of them are prepared to face _that_ horror. People without souls are a common feature of legend – some say the sun is a man, and the moon is his daemon, separated from him and travelling the sky to try and find her way back – but the truth of it is that intercision is one of the few things that all men fear. Most men would rather die.

Scott’s daughter stands respectfully when they are brought to her. “My name is Madi,” she tells them. “This is Gvenour.”

Gvenour inclines his head in greeting, cautious of his antlers – Reintje hisses, and Madi frowns ever-so-slightly in confusion at it. Her reaction to the mention of Ben’s intercision is normal, at least: she looks as deeply, viscerally, appalled as the crew were, and she explains as quickly and regretfully as she can.

“It was an accident. Part of his crew’s cargo was stolen from the British, and when it washed up – it was a subtle knife. No one realised until it was too late. We have disposed of it.”

John doesn’t ask where Ben’s daemon is, whether it is dead, no matter how badly he wants to and even though Reintje, desperate and more emotional than she ever is, whispers in his ear to do so; daemons do not survive without their humans the way that humans do, if _that_ can be considered a life. To ask would be to be disappointed. And besides, he tells himself, it doesn’t matter – the important questions, of whether the Maroons will try and intercise the Walrus’s crew, of why Ben is alive when the rest of his crew is dead (useless for questioning, he’s shaking hideously, he can barely speak) have been answered.

Now he just needs to know what Madi and her mother will do next.

 

*

 

John is kind of horribly obvious with his love – which is to say, Reintje is, all-too-visibly mooning over Gvenour every second that they’re together, while John and Madi unwittingly make eye contact over crowded rooms, when he and Reintje emerge awkwardly from her bedroom every morning.

James tries not to look. Cor can’t help himself.

“Were we like that?” he whispers to his human. “Did we look like that?”

If James were alone he would squash down those longings, repress them and never think of them again, but he’s not alone and he can’t argue with the other half with him. Not about Thomas.

With Thomas, they’d been scared of retribution for their love. James had masked his adoring smiles and held back from physical affection. Cor had sat on his tail to hide its wagging. But, still – they had been so in love.

“I don’t know.” he answers, honestly, hoarsely. “I don’t know.”

When John and Madi lie in bed together, Gvenour lies across its foot, and Reintje with him. They’re quiet – Madi is the sort of person who only needs to exchange a glance with her daemon to know what he’s thinking, and Gvenour is more accustomed to silent, careful observation than commentary – but intensely happy, and Reintje likes the chance to be herself with someone other than just John, undisturbed and undisguised. “He and I have rarely had that,” she tells Gvenour, in secret, as their  humans sleep. “He doesn’t really know how to be at peace.”

Gvenour gently bumps his head against Reintje’s, and she thinks that all is well – except, of course, that they are losing the war.

 

*

 

“ _Long_ John Silver.” bites out Max, when they meet again, under the cover of dark and the ever-present, unspoken threat of the redcoats. “You don’t look so different to me. Neither of you.”

In the night, both Reintje and Dashielle’s eyes glow; they can see each other more clearly than their humans, and neither of them like what they see. John is the same as he ever was, older and with half a leg less than last time they met, but still a trickster, and Dashielle doesn’t believe for half a second that he’s changed from the man prepared to sell Spanish state secrets for black pearls – Max, taking advantage of their new lords to seize control of Nassau and line her own pockets, in her new finery, disgusts Reintje worse than Israel Hands and his spiteful pitbull daemon, who had at least been predictable. But then, neither of them know the full story.

Charles Vane is dead, and they are all far too aware of that, and Max saw Aubrianna keep watching even when Eleanor turned her face away, and she saw Hedda stretch out a paw towards her human through the cage they’d put her in as she disintegrated into Dust and blew away on the wind.

When Max turned on Jack Rackham, it was done in the knowledge that Anne and Neron would get away; Anne hadn’t wanted her to touch Neron, ever, and she understands that completely, but it’s been _months_ and still when Max’s thoughts turn to Anne, Dashielle goes to hide in her chest, meows piteously. She would never explain herself to John Silver, of all people, but she doesn’t feel half as guilty as he had expected, and Reintje can see that. They might be on different sides now, but she and Dashielle understand each other well to know that they will do what it takes to survive. John will kill those who do not respect the black spot, and Max will hand in her ex-lover’s ex-lover to the British.

They part ways suddenly and unsatisfied, and neither is surprised by that.

 

*

 

When they were children, Aubrianna and Gvenour would take the same form – mostly Gvenour would copy Aubrianna, even if he didn’t mean to, just as Madi would try to mimic Eleanor, because the other girl was older and prettier and, even if they were almost sisters when they were with Madi’s father, Eleanor’s father  had looked on Madi like she was lesser.

And now they are adults, and the only constant is that Eleanor is taller. Madi can see now that she’s more mature, Eleanor is pretty, but she’s not so perfect as she had seemed, and she feels not the slightest shred of desire to look like her; Eleanor has been a queen, of sorts, but one on an unsteady throne, with unruly subjects, where Madi is loved, and unquestioned. And Aubrianna is a milksnake, and Gvenour is a hartebeest, as different as two daemons can be.

Eleanor has not been ashamed of her snake daemon for years – or, really, ever – but something about Madi and Gvenour and their elegance makes Aubrianna slither off her shoulders and rest more out of the way, on the table of the cottage where they’re hiding from the Spanish.

“I’m so sorry that we end like this.” says Gvenour, voice low, the first thing he’s said for days.

Eleanor smiles, and the whole thing is pyrrhic, almost painful, as Aubrianna curls into a smaller spiral unhappily.

“I don’t know what I would have done differently.”

Neither of them mention Woodes Rogers and his greyhound daemon. Neither of them mention Max, or Charles, or John. Neither of them have time.

Gvenour sinks gracefully to lie on the ground, and Madi reaches out as though to put her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder – but then they hear growling from the doorway, of the Spanish soldier’s daemon who has found them, and by the time that Flint and Cor find them, Madi is gone, taken, and Eleanor is bleeding out.

The emotions that James gets from Cor, not to mention his own, are overwhelming, and he’s not entirely sure he understands them, the panic and the fear and the regret and the sadness, and something other than that, something complicated and familial, like –

Like she’s his daughter, he realises.

It’s too late to save her: all he can do is move out of the way enough that Aubrianna can slide towards her human’s side and be with her, helplessly smoothing Eleanor’s hair out of her face and telling her to breathe, to clear the smoke from her lungs, while Cor whimpers in distress beside him. She’s gone with a soft exhale and a shimmer of Dust, and James sits back on his knees and strokes Cor, and doesn’t bother to pretend the tears in his eyes are from the smoke.

 

*

 

Watching John and Reintje as they realise that Madi is in danger is uncomfortably like looking through a dark mirror at himself in Charlestown, and it raises Cor’s fur, sets James on edge. The kind of rage that has a man’s daemon snapping and pacing all hours of the day for weeks on end, even when he’s superficially calm, isn’t healthy at all; watching Reintje for more than a minute is enough to tell James that the tangle of love and worry and anger John is feeling is eating him up from the inside. They watch him speak to the crew with his smile too-tight and his hand balled into a fist, and James turns, silently, to look at Cor.

“You don’t need me to tell you.” says Cor in an undertone, his ears flicking.

“We’ll talk to them.” James agrees. He wants to, and Cor can feel that: he and John have talked intimately only once before, on the eve of their first battle with Rogers and his men, and he wants John to give him that same trust – because when John had asked in whose name James was fighting, James had found that he couldn’t lie. Cor had stood to howl miserably, and underneath the howling, in a voice that only John could hear, he’d confessed more than he’d meant to; he’d confessed all of it, in fact, every part of who he was and who Thomas and Miranda had been to him, and how Batair was so caring, how Malf – he says _Jakamalfi_ , and it feels strange, because she has never been anything other than Malf in his memories – was so wild. He’d said _Corentin_ , instead of Cor, more than once, but he hadn’t cared at the time. What he had cared about was that he had spilled his darkest secrets, had confessed to being a sinner and a sodomite, and John had simply nodded, and listened, and accepted. _Know no shame_ , Thomas and Miranda had told him, a thousand times over - without them it’s easy to forget that, but James had looked at John and his neutral expression, and then at Reintje, and her calm fondness, and been satisfied with his position in the world for the first time in a long time.

The hard part about trying to do the same for John and Reintje is getting them to sit still. Since that clearly won’t happen, he has to have Cor grab Reintje by the scruff of the neck (she scratches, but he’s battle-hardened) and use her to pull John up onto a hill, ostensibly to practice John’s technique with a blade one-legged. John bitches the whole time, about how unfair it is that Cor is sitting on his daemon, and he won’t be in the direct action for most of the attack, and _is this really fucking necessary, Captain?_

They’ve been sparring for maybe half an hour when Reintje manages to squirm out of Cor’s hold and bite him; Cor yelps “asshole!” at the top of his lungs, and somehow it makes John laugh as he smoothes his daemon’s fur, tired enough by the exercise that he’s forgotten why he’s fighting.

James looks curiously at the pair of them and asks, “When did she settle?”

John is silent for a long moment, and then he pastes a blank expression on his face and simply says, “I don’t remember” with a shrug.

He’s lying. That much is obvious. He’s lying and barely even trying to hide it, and James can’t help but wonder why he does that, why he would show enough of his real self to him that it’s obvious that certain things – Solomon Little, the orphanage in Whitechapel, not remembering the most defining moment of a person’s _life_ , how his daemon settled – aren’t true, but refuse to tell the truth. Perhaps it’s the closest to opening up that he can expect from such a man, but he still presses further.

“How old were you?”

Ignoring him, John pulls himself up and lifts his makeshift sparring sword again. James hesitates, then changes tactics.

“How young were you, that you needed a marten to help you survive?”

Reintje snarls, something feral and uncontrolled, even as John’s mask cracks just enough for James to see that he’s the kind of mad that comes from fear and denial, that the question hit too close for comfort. He’s surprised when John lunges at him, but he’s better trained and more practiced, and he blocks it easily.

The two humans keep fighting – James wins, repeatedly, although with considerably less ease than he would have done when they first met, but John presses forward – and Reintje turns to Cor, teeth bared and ready to strike. Cor simply sits and waits, alert but not aggressive, unprepared to move first. When Reintje’s attack doesn’t come, he says,

“You _know_ us. More intimately than anyone else living. And yet we know nothing about you, where you’re from, who you were.”

Reintje relaxes just a fraction knowing that she doesn’t have to scrap with a daemon so much larger than her, but she shakes the question off of herself, as though ridding her fur of water.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

James and John are busy, they’re not paying attention, not listening. Cor inclines his head curiously at her.

“What are you planning?”

And John falters and misses a blow, and Cor knows that it’s because of something that he can just about see in Reintje’s expression, regret and hurt and longing.

She doesn’t answer him.

 

*

 

The world they know collapses around their ears – but as it does, another takes its place, as smoothly as if it had always been. Max rises to her new position in it without even the slightest hesitation; she is not Eleanor Guthrie, and the pirates – which is to say, the ‘privateers’ – of New Providence know that, but they turn to her for orders and trade in just the same way that they had with Eleanor, and just as they had been with her and Max, they’re clever enough not to mention the way that the imposing figure of Anne Bonny melts when Max smiles at her. Dashielle, the soft cushions of the brothel quite forgotten, takes to sleeping on stacks of accounting reports and tally sheets on Max’s desk, and Featherstone’s shrew daemon jokes that he dreams there of profit margins.

Jack is... more contented than he thought he’d be. He loves Anne, more than he knows how to say, but it takes far less time than he thought it would for the sight of her with Max to stop hurting. Triszilli rolls her eyes in exasperation and hits the side of his head with all her small might when she catches him thinking about it.

“You want her to be _happy_!” she shouts, clinging to his ear with all four feet so that he has absolutely no opportunity to ignore her and is forced to perform a rather undignified hop to shake her off. Jack’s father used to chide him for arguing with his daemon, called it _unbecoming for a smart young boy like you_ , and _fruitless besides._ Triszilli, who starts most of the arguments in the first place, used to stick her tongue out at Jack’s father behind his back.

“Yes, well,” he snaps back, settling her on his forearm so that they can look over the edge of his ship together at the vastness of the sea. “She is. Happy, that is. And we’re alone.”

“Ain’t alone.” comes a low, gruff, voice from Jack’s right that he only barely recognises: he turns, with some considerable shock, to see Neron standing by him. Anne is leaning on the mast, and under the shadow of her broad hat he thinks he sees an expression of reluctant fondness on her face. Neron breaking his silence means this is important to her, he is very aware of that, and Jack lowers his head at the thought of her having heard him express even a shred of doubt in her. Her daemon is an intensely private one – Jack has touched him, accidentally, in the heat of battle, or when he and Anne have been in bed, and he’s apologised profusely every time, knowing that they may be close but Anne will never allow anyone close enough to hurt Neron – and he’s barely said ten words even to Triszilli in the _decade_ that they’ve known each other.

“S’like I said.” Anne tells him as she walks towards him, less harshly than usual. “Brothers in arms, you and me.”

Jack puts an arm over her, and kisses her forehead like a brother, and when Max and Dashielle seem to sense that something has happened and come out of his cabin to join them, Triszilli climbs back onto his shoulder and he extends his other arm to Max. And she only pauses for a second before she leans into him, too.

 

*

 

More than anything, James is furious. He should have known that John would do _something_ , something reckless and self-serving and utterly brutal. They’ve changed, since they were those two men on a beach with nothing more than John’s memory of a stolen schedule binding them together – but they haven’t changed that much.

“In order for us to have peace,” John explains, in that clipped tone he uses when he knows he’s being one of the villains, and James wonders who he means by ‘us’. “Flint has to die.”

James, shackled across from him in a carriage on its way to _fucking Savannah,_ with Cor muzzled at their feet, just glares wordlessly at him. _Get on and kill us, you bastard_ , he would say if he could, but with his soul so forcibly silenced he won’t speak.

They saved Madi. John had found her and freed her from Rogers and his chains – and imposed those chains on Nassau – and kissed her like she was air to a half-drowned man, and Reintje had scurried up her arm, and Gvenour had pressed his forehead against John’s. Try as he might, James can’t bring himself to resent that she’s safe.

He’s quite prepared to resent John for everything else, though.

The guards at the gate of the plantation have big, mean-looking dog daemons that snarl at Cor as they approach, in the knowledge that the still-bound Cor can’t snarl back. James isn’t so sure that they would still be growling at him if he wasn’t bound, though – and, in fact, the whole situation seems increasingly off: this place might seem secure to someone with no experience in the matter, but James and his tactical mind can see at least six different ways, easily, to bust out from the inside, and he doesn’t honestly believe that John is stupid enough to think that these walls could contain him.

 _If he’s going to kill us, why doesn’t he just kill us and get it over with?_ he thinks again, and gets a wave of uncertainty from Cor.

John and Reintje leave them at the entrance, Reintje with a cryptic glance over her human’s shoulder, and James, overcome with the overwhelming strangeness of it all and exhausted and fuming, allows himself and Cor to be unshackled and led into a field of working men.

It can’t be.

It _can’t_ be.

James rejects the evidence of his eyes for a long minute, simply refuses to accept the things that he sees before him as reality. How many times has he seen an owl daemon and thought desperately, helplessly of Malf? But Thomas is dead. He tells himself that every night, every morning, forcing down his dreams of those bright eyes, that smile, that head of fair hair. There’s no way on this Earth that the man he sees before him, that man so alien and yet so familiar – his hair is greyer, and he had always been clean-shaven, before, and he had never had those work-roughened lines worn into his face and hands; and yet, the more James tries to deny to himself that this man is who he cannot be, the surer he is – is Lord Thomas Hamilton, completely displaced from the world he was born in and hidden away on a plantation to rot.

The stranger that he recognises slowly straightens up, squinting at James and his daemon through the sunlight, and his own long-eared owl daemon reshuffles her wings unsteadily.

There’s no doubt in his heart now.

James stays entirely still, but he feels the ground shake around him as his world unravels and reforms in a heartbeat, as the broken shards of a universe that had fallen apart when Thomas was gone come back together.

And then he’s running forwards and into the arms of his love with _Corentin_ at his side, a Brittany dog bounding so urgently towards Thomas that the Dust of his transformation is still swirling around his smaller, smoother body. James kisses him without thinking, without caring, and feels Thomas gather him up tight and hold him close, feels Thomas’s tears against his neck, Malf’s claws on his shoulders.

Flint is dead, and the coyote Cor with him, and James couldn’t care less. They are whole again.

**Author's Note:**

> full list of daemons:
> 
> * John Silver - female marten, Reintje  
> * James McGraw - male Brittany dog, Corentin  
> * Flint - male coyote, Cor  
> * Max - male Chantilly/Tiffany cat, Dashielle  
> * Eleanor Guthrie - female milk snake, Aubrianna  
> * Billy Bones - female golden retriever, Lieali  
> * Thomas Hamilton - female long-eared owl, Jakimalf  
> * Miranda Barlow - male crow, Batair  
> * Charles Vane - female wolverine, Hedda  
> * Anne Bonny - male boar, Neron  
> * Jack Rackham - female chameleon, Triszilli  
> * Madi Scott - male hartebeast, Gvenour  
> * Hal Gates - female chapukin, Aberian  
> * Admiral Henessey - unnamed female wolfhound  
> * Alfred Hamilton - unnamed crocodile  
> * Doctor Howell - unnamed crane  
> * Abigail Ashe - unnamed wren  
> * Ben Gunn - none  
> * Israel Hands - unnamed pitbull  
> * Woodes Rogers - unnamed greyhound  
> * Featherstone - unnamed shrew
> 
> I'm lesbianeurydice on tumblr if you want to yell at me
> 
> title is actually a Tom Waits reference, despite being the vaguest possible one! I like certain parts of 'swordfishtrombone' in reference to James and Corentin, specifically:  
> "he came home from the war with a party in his head"  
> "had a pair of lips that opened up like butterfly wings, and a mad dog who wouldn't sit still"  
> "some say he's doing the obituary mambo, some say that he's hanging on the wall, perhaps this yarn is the only thing that holds this man together, some say that he was never here at all".


End file.
